The famous, radical study
LAING, R.D., and A. ESTERSON. Sanity, Madness and the Family. London: Tavistock Publications. 1964.
8vo. Original black cloth with title lettering in silver to spine, upper edge lilac; brown dust jacket with white lettering; pp. [xi], 272, [iv]; minimal bruising to top and bottom of spine; dust jacket with short marginal flaws to wrappers, otherwise near fine.
Second edition, signed by Laing, "To Mike/From Ronnie/July 1970", to front fly leaf.
In the 1960s, Glaswegian psychiatrist R.D. Laing took not only the title of Scotland's most famous celebrity in his field but for a period, he was one of the most famous therapists in the world and of his generation's counterculture.
Nicknamed the "high priest of anti-psychiatry", Laing's experience of establishing an alternative experiment for schizophrenic patients in Gartnavel Hospital led to the publication of his first book, The Divided Self (1960), which quickly became a global phenomenon, selling 700,000 copies in the UK alone.
Sanity, Madness and the Family is Laing's study of eleven families of women diagnosed with schizophrenia, an investigation which the authors began in 1958.
Sanity, Madness and the Family was the only series of studies of families of schizophrenia to appear at its time of publication. The book caused widespread controversy in its assumption that schizophrenia could be blamed on the parents of patients and was met with widespread hostility by the profession upon its first publication, where the conventional opinion was to treat psychosis as a strictly medical issue.
Regardless, this famous and polarising study radically exposed the contested nature of schizophrenia and other psychotic states.
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